The Austin Healey Project: Engine Rebuilding

Gary my Machinist

The first order of business was to find the right machine shop and, as I found later, the right machinist. Every machine shop in Portland and on the West Coast will say they can do the work on your BMC A Series engine. And most are telling the truth to some extent. We are talking about an inline 4 cylinder engine with all of the specifications readily available online and most shops have modern machining equipment that can do the work. I started with a few recommendations from local car owners and shops, then I interviewed three highly recommended machine shops. In the end, I was most impressed with Gary, at the NAPA machine shop on SE 9th and Morrison. When I walked into his shop, I saw an A Series1275 exactly like mine, a few MGA and MGB engines, plus a Jaguar engine and some, whose lineage I was not sure of but were obviously British, in various states of machining and rebuild in an immaculate, organized machine shop. Immaculate and organized is not what you usually see in a machine shop. I thought I was in the right place. A few minutes into our "interview", I realized that I was the one being interviewed. Gary knew everything about my engine. He said, if (yes if) my core engine was acceptable to him to begin with, and I would agree to buy the parts he recommended, he "might" agree to do the machine work. One major issue was that I wanted to do the rebuild myself. He was, at first, not too amenable to me building the engine. After all, he was going to do all the hard and expert work on the cleaning and machining. Gary really cared about the outcome of his work and knew how valuable his experience and knowledge would be in the actual putting of the parts together. Once I explained to him the history of the car, how my father and I had done this together before, and the fact that I really needed to do the assembly myself, he signed up. Though probably still with some skepticism. I am glad he accepted me as a customer. I knew I was working with one of the best British engine guys I could find. One who would challenge me from a quality standpoint and make me fully justify the what and why of any decisions I made on the engine rebuild. I learned a ton from Gary. Just look at the pictures of the engine he machined and prepped for me. "It is a thing of Beauty" was what he said when I was picking it up. That is not to say we did not have our disagreements though. Gary likes to build a stock engine and he does it well. A well built stock A series engine will run 150,000 to 200,000 miles with the right maintenance. Still we found our common ground on the modifications I was planning. Between the .060 inch rebore, the non stock 9.75:1 compression pistons, the APT "swept head with oversized 1.4" intake valves, a fast street cam from Delta Cams, and the harder than hell steel EN40B crank. I can remember Gary saying, somewhat discussed with me , "So you got me bronze valve guides when I told you to buy cast iron guides." We discussed the implications of this decision too as we had on other places we departed on philosophy, and we agreed the decision was mine and he whole heartily let me know the best way to proceed even if it was not his best and recommended method. Gary was a true partner who I was able to talk through the options and consequences with. Once he was finished, I took it all home in pieces to begin the actual rebuild. For the rest of this post, I will simply post pictures with captions that show the progress. Double click on any picture for a closer view.